Years ago a writer for the travel section of the LA Times wrote a nice story which began something like.."If you asked Jimmy the Greek in Las Vegas for the odds on a young man going off to a small island in the Pacific and surviving as an artist"...needless to say they weren't very good. Yet from the moment of stepping onto the wharf and seeing the happy smiling faces laden with frangipani flower garlands greeting their family members from NZ I somehow knew I had come 'home'.. Rarotonga was little known in those days- information was hard to come by, and in order to get a berth on the ship I had agreed to take a Fiji Indian traders 'island goods' in two hugh suitcases and do my best to create some business for him. And when asked by a store manager what I was going to do on the island I answered that as an artist I was going to paint. "what?- says he " "These beautiful people of course" said I and two days later sold him my first painting of a young girl - for the massive sum of 35 guineas - about a $100 dollars actually- which was enough to live on for three months at that time - and so my island adventure began.
